The gendered nature of the agricultural sector is significantly influenced by the political and socio-economic and cultural structure of any society. The division of labor between males and females within the family farm is seriously affected as a response to economic pressures along with the impact of other restrictions imposed by predetermined gender roles. In the Palestinian context, economic pressures were created mainly by the structural transformation in Palestinian agriculture following the Zionist settler colonization of Palestine, along with other minor factors related to the Palestinian neo-liberal economic policies dictated by the international financial institution and Zionist interests. This article argues that the gendered nature of the Palestinian agriculture sector has been transformed and has promoted women’s exploitation as follows: First, restructure of the agricultural employment by the decline of both women’s and men’s employment of the total Palestinian labor force within serious exploitive and fluctuating conditions; second, changes in tasks and division of labor, women’s property rights for agricultural land resources and services provided by the Palestinian Authority; and finally increasing women’s burden by increasing their time allocation for agricultural tasks. The data presented in the article are based on a comprehensive analysis of secondary information on Palestinian agriculture, and primary data collected in 2010 with the help of a few households case studies (life history) from two locations in the central region of the West Bank.

Questioning Financial Governance from a Feminist Perspective brings together feminist economists and feminist political economists from different countries located in North America and Europe to analyze the 'strategic silence' about gender in fiscal and monetary policy, and financial regulation. This silence reflects a set of assumptions that the key instruments of financial governance are gender-neutral. This often masks the ways in which financial governance operates to the disadvantage of women and reinforces gender inequality. This book examines both the transformations in the governance of finance that predate the financial crisis, as well as some dimension of the crisis itself. The transformations increasingly involved private as well as public forms of power, along with institutions of state and civil society, operating at the local, national, regional and global levels. An important aspect of these transformations has been the creation of policy rules (often enacted in laws) that limit the discretion of national policy makers with respect to fiscal, monetary, and financial sector policies. These policy rules tend to have inscribed in them a series of biases that have gender (as well as class and race-based) outcomes. The biases identified by the authors in the various chapters are the deflationary bias, male breadwinner bias, and commodification bias, adding two new biases: risk bias and creditor bias. The originality of the book is that its primary focus is on macroeconomic policies (fiscal and monetary) and financial governance from a feminist perspective with a focus on the gross domestic product and its fluctuations and growth, paid employment and inflation, the budget surplus/deficit, levels of government expenditure and tax revenue, and supply of money. The central findings are that the key instruments of financial governance are not gender neutral. Each chapter considers examples of financial governance, and how it relates to the gender order, including divisions of labour, and relations of power and privilege. (Summary from WorldCat)

Table of Contents:

1. Macroeconomic regimes in OECD countries and the interrelation with gender orders

This report aims to show how macroeconomic policies create differential opportunities for women and men. This volume comprises nine chapters covering four broad themes: gender as a category of analysis in macroeconomics; the implications of gender for macroeconomic aggregates, in particular consumption and economic growth; the role of gender in the labor market, globalization, and access to credit; and gender budgeting. Chapters one and two address the first theme. Chapter one focuses on the macroeconomic cost to growth and development that arises from rigid gender roles and associated gender asymmetries. Chapter two documents the progress made in gender mainstreaming by highlighting developments in data collection and monitoring that have moved beyond simply disaggregating data by male and female. Chapters three and four cover the second theme. Chapter three considers the role of gender relations in the macroeconomic aggregates of consumption, savings, investment, and government expenditure and the implications for macroeconomic policy in these areas. Chapter four examines gender relations and economic growth. Chapters five through seven focus on the third theme. Chapter five examines the labor market. Chapter six examines how globalization affects gender relations, particularly employment. Chapter seven concentrates on women's access to finance and documents gender asymmetries in this market. Chapter eight, on the fourth theme, highlights the impact fiscal policies have on gender relations. It documents how policy can be made more gender specific and reports on the progress made by countries that have adopted gender-responsive government budgeting. Chapter nine summarizes what is known about gender and macroeconomic policy, noting areas in which the literature is well developed as well as areas that require further research and study (Summary from WorldCat).

With contributions from leading scholars, this anthology critically examines the relationships between gender, growth, development and the World Bank. Highlighting the importance and challenge of taking gender into account in development theory and policy, it will be a useful resource for policymakers, activists and scholars alike (Summary from WorldCat).

Table of Contents:

1. Feminist economics and the World Bank : an introduction

Drucilla K. Barker and Edith Kuiper

2. The World Bank, development, adjustment and gender equality

Zafiris Tzannatos

3. An assessment of efforts to promote gender equality at the World Bank

Carolyn M. Long

4. Rhetoric and realities : a comment

Sakuntala Navarsimhan

5. Engendering development : a critique

Rose-Marie Avin

6. Engendering agricultural technology for Africa's farmers

Cheryl Doss

7. Taking gender differences in bargaining power seriously

Stephanie Seguino

8. World Bank discourse and World Bank policy in Engendering development : a comment

Karin Schoenpflug

9. Colonizing knowledge : economics and interdisciplinarity in Engendering development

Suzanne Bergeron

10. Adjustment with a woman's face : gender and macroeconomic policy at the World Bank

Cynthia Wood

11. Gender and intrahousehold decision-making : international migration and other frontiers for development policy

Aida Orgocka and Gale Summerfield

12. Engendering development or gender main-streaming? : a critical assessment from the Commonwealth Caribbean

Violet Eudine Barriteau

13. "Disciplining" and "engendering" the World Bank : a comment

Laura Parisi

14. A seat at the table : feminist economists negotiate development

Drucilla K. Barker

15. Why feminist economists should pay more attention to the coherence between the World Bank and the WTO

Mariama Williams

16. Engendering the German Parliamentary Commission report on "Globalization of the world economy"

This text provides a wide-ranging and accessible acount of the constitution and effects of discourses of neoliberal governance. Paying particular attention to how gender matters in and to contemporary global governance, the author focuses in particular on the development discourse of the World Bank (Summary from WorldCat).

Focuses on the debates surrounding structural lending programmes and the effect they have on women in Africa. It questions the conventional dependency model and provides some counter-evidence that the economic position of women in societies with freer market policies has improved (Summary from WorldCat).

The political project of reasserting feminist engagement with development has proceeded uneasily in recent years. This text examines how the arguments of feminist researchers have often become depoliticised by development institutions and offers accounts of the pitfalls and compromises of the politics of engagement (Summary from WorldCat).

Table of Contents:

1. Gender myths that instrumentalise women : a view from the Indian frontline

Srilatha Batliwala and Deepa Dhanraj

2. Dangerous equations? : how female-headed households became the poorest of the poor : causes, consequences and cautions

Sylvia Chant

3. Back to women? translations, re-significations, and myths of gender in policy and practice in Brazil

Cecilia Sardenberg

4. Battles over booklets : gender myths in the British aid programme

Rosalind Eyben

5. Not very poor, powerless or pregnant : the African woman forgotten by development

Everjoice Win

6. 'Streetwalkers show the way' : reframing the debate on trafficking from sex workers' perspective

Nandinee Bandyopadhyay with Swapna Gayen [and others]

7. Gender, myth and fable : the perils of mainstreaming in sector bureaucracies

Hilary Standing

8. Making sense of gender in shifting institutional contexts : some reflections on gender mainstreaming

Ramya Subrahmanian

9. Gender mainstreaming : what is it (about) and should we continue doing it?

Prudence Woodford-Berger

10. Mainstreaming gender or 'streaming' gender away : feminists marooned in the development business

A critique of how the World Bank encourages gender norms, Developing Partnerships argues that financial institutions are key players in the global enforcement of gender and family expectations. By combining analysis of documents produced and sponsored by the World Bank with interviews of World Bank staffers and case studies, Kate Bedford presents a detailed examination of gender and sexuality in the policies of the world's most influential development institution (Summary from WorldCat).

Table of Contents:

1. Working women, caring men, and the family bank : ideal gender relations after the Washington consensus

2. The model region remodels partnerships : the politics of gender research in Latin America and the Caribbean

Most treatments of economic change harbour a conceptual silence: the refusal to recognise that global restructuring is occurring on a gendered terrain. This book's unique contribution to the literature on restructuring and adjustment lies in its application of feminist scholarship to macroeconomics. The contributors focus on these conceptual silences, examining macroeconomic methods and policies in order to propose new research strategies to deliver a more gender-aware economics (Summary from WorldCat).